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The Archive
101 corroborated cases of recovered memory

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Dr. August Piper (1999)
Dr. Richard McNally (2003)

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The Archive > 43 Cases from Legal Proceedings

back to Crook vs. Murphy

Excerpt from Katy Butler,
"Did Daddy Really Do It?"
Los Angeles Times (February 5, 1995)[Book Review]: 1.

"Almost all of Ofshe and Watters' case studies are hidden behind pseudonyms from independent inquiry, forcing the reader to trust the writer's conclusions rather than see how they were reached. The looseness with which he treats the material is evident in Chapter 6 of Making Monsters. Here he tells the story of 'Jane'--a Washington state woman called Lynn Crook who has identified herself in a letter she circulated to the media disputing Ofshe's account. In Ofshe's account, Crook was led down the garden path by self-help books and therapists until she fabricated horrible memories of sexual abuse by her father, a respectable physician. Two of her sisters, apparently caught up in the hysteria, supposedly then interpreted vague and ambiguous memories as signs that they, too, had been abused. Crook sued her father (both Ofshe and Loftus appeared as expert witnesses at the trial) and, reportedly to 'empower' herself, sought out a local newspaper reporter. As the chapter ends, she appears headed into the delusionary territory of satanic ritual abuse: She recalls seeing a crowd standing around a bonfire in masks, robes.

"Although this chapter is told as though Ofshe and Watters can read Crook's mind--her 'heart races' at one point--they did not interview her or the sisters who testified on her behalf. The tale is an embellished reconstitution of the court records, and discrepancies in the details do not inspire confidence in Ofshe and Watters' contention that Crook's memories were caused by reckless therapy and the reading of self-help books. The authors have fiddled with the timeline, making it appear that Crook read and positively reviewed The Courage to Heal before, rather than after, she recovered memories of abuse. Crook, in fact, never told anyone that she had informed a local reporter of her suit against her father to 'empower' herself; she responded to a phone call from a reporter who ran across the legal filing. One of Crook's sisters supposedly testified that her father had once told her to close her legs; the book, however, omits the last half of the father's reported sentence--'or I'll think you want me.' And while Crook's therapist's notes did refer to a frightening memory of people standing around a bonfire in masks, the reference to robes was invented, making the memory sound more indicative of the delusions of satanic ritual abuse that Ofshe seems eager to find everywhere."

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